A tone has crept into American indies, a heavily-internalized aura in which we learn nothing much about anyone and nothing much happens. Often, we’re meant to stew in a mood of inarticulate regret and longing, waiting for a plot or anything resembling a passing diversion. Critics usually fall for this self-enchanted blah-ness—see the accolades that greeted Charlottes Wells’ unwatchably precious “Aftersun” last year. But this evasiveness often strikes me as a means of playing it safe, an act of making a movie that’s a grappling with whether or not a director wants to make movies. For a little while, Jamie Dack’s “Palm Trees and Power Lines” seems like it’s going to be this kind of movie, when in fact it’s more like the evil cousin of “Aftersun,” warping that film’s father-daughter melancholia into something more visceral and disturbing.
We are in Nowheresville somewhere in the Southwest, which appears to be a maze of strip malls and fast-food joints and teenagers who’ve gone feral with boredom. One of the kids, Lea (Lily McInerny), has a sense that’s something’s missing from her life but has no idea how to change her circumstances. Dad’s long gone, and her mother (Gretchen Mol) is a real estate agent who drinks wine and rotates through various dudes of the week, suggesting that Lea will not escape her own misery in a few years, but merely graduate to a middle-aged brand of disenchantment. Refreshingly, director Dack doesn’t vilify mom, seeing her ungratified need as vividly as Lea’s. She is, however, understandably more critical of Lea’s friends, an all-too-realistic pack of teens who seem to think of little apart from fornicating, fast food, and booze, all while predictably sucked into the mindless void of their phones. The worst of them is Lea’s bestie, Amber (Quinn Frankel), who thinks nothing of selling out her friend to impress the hostile jag-offs who use her for sex.
This is all brutal and totally hopeless in the manner of an indie looking to assert its street cred. Surely some kids still read books? Someone, somewhere, has ambition? It’s intuitively evident that Dack knows these folks aren’t representative of everyone. These are the unmotivated, potentially bad kids without the drive that’s needed to transcend the austerity of their surroundings. Such boredom, when allowed to ferment, can lead to evil. Watching “Palm Trees and Power Lines,” I wondered if this crew was one plot turn away from the hell of Tim Hunter’s “River’s Edge.” Lea doesn’t fit and she knows it, yet she also knows that if she doesn’t change course she may—terrifyingly—come to suit her crew. Into this maelstrom of confusion, of feeling alone and taken for granted and unheard and unformed, enters Mr. Wrong, who calls himself Tom (Jonathan Tucker).
Tom is in a café when Lea is pressured into pulling a dine-n-dash and heckled by a cook who expects these punks to pay their tab. He rallies to her defense while her friends bail, and drives his truck alongside her as she walks towards home. This scene of flirtation is a masterclass in eliciting a double reaction from the audience: Tom is 34 and looks it, a real man with an experienced, muscled body, and Lea is 17 and looks it, a tangle of knees and elbows desperate for her womanliness to be noticed by someone other than the unfathomably cocky, two-pump-chumps she hangs with. Tom notices, and we share Lea’s gratitude while feeling aghast that she might fall for one of the oldest tricks in the book.
Tom has “predator” written in all caps all over him, and this long flirtatious idyll establishes that he’s a skilled groomer—a con man with the empathy to say what his prey wants to hear. The suspense, then, resides in our trying to parse out degrees of badness. Is Tom into scoring with teen girls, which is probably the best case here, or is he setting Lea up for something even more sinister?
At this point in the film, Dack’s sustained tone of contemporary indie-movie ennui begins to pay off. “Palm Trees and Power Lines” is a highly controlled piece of work. The director creates space for the characters to read one another, desperately, for signs of generosity and weakness. And the indie-movie austerity of the first act—in which characters are shown to have no interests apart from satiating base hungers—allows us to feel this desperation. In this barren west are spiders playing poker with the bugs they might cocoon. With pauses and shadows, with exploratory gestures and tightly held close-ups that make us aware of even minute breathing rhythms, Dack creates and sustains a mood of erotic dread that brings to mind Bob Fosse’s “Star 80” and Joyce Chopra’s “Smooth Talk.”
The decision to keep us in the dark for so long about the nature of Tom’s motivation is more than a suspense gambit. This mystery places us in Lea’s shoes, imbuing each of Tom’s grooming gestures with the element of mystery that’s necessary for them to work. Manipulations thrive on uncertainty. At first, Tom is enormously pleased with Lea for being just who she is, and he pays her compliments that her mother is too distracted to pay, and that her dunderhead friends are too selfish to even consider. Then one day’s there’s a bit less attention, then a bit less, then to attain this attention just a simple favor is required, then something just a little less simple. Tom’s methods of indoctrination are ruthlessly convincing. One moment, Tom’s cuddling, the next he’s asking for a blowjob with an insistence that unmistakably connotes a potential for violence.
Years ago, Tucker was competing with actors like Ben Foster for the title of smarmiest new dick in American movies. His moment faded, and now he’s back with more tools in his kit. I predict a resurgence, though this role may be too repellent for the revival that Tucker deserves. Eric Roberts never entirely escaped just how fearlessly sleazy and pitiful he was as Paul Snider in “Star 80.” Similarly, Tucker gets at the root of the malevolent smugness that drove his early bad-guy roles, elucidating the many notes of male carnivorousness that exist between a flirty conversation in a parking lot and a transgression in a motel room that redefines what Lea thinks she’s capable of doing. The need to show off has been burned out of Tucker by experience; he invests every gesture with the promise of either aggression or companionship—or both. It’s a potent combo that gets at the transactional nature of even healthier relationships. Men, you may walk away from this movie feeling indicted, and not without good reason.
Lily McInerny is revelatory in a performance that’s more difficult and thankless than Tucker’s. Sure, Tucker is taking the big risks, but Tom also allows him to dominate the movie. Lea is an even subtler and trickier role, and McInerny resists the impulse to turn her into a standard-issue, snarky, know-it-all teen. It is a disconcertingly vulnerable performance. Many teens in movies are played by older women with modeling careers, yet McInerny never lets you forget that Lea is a girl. She intensifies Tucker and vice versa.
Older man, younger girl. It’s one of the archetypal porn set-ups, and men aren’t the only ones with such fantasies. Dack is too much of an artist to turn Lea into merely a victim for a feminist sermon. Early on, the film is willing to understand the sexiness and wonderful danger of a forbidden affair. You’re allowed to see the intoxicating thrill of the porn fantasy for a little while, until the worm turns in a scene of daring intimacy. In one moment, Dack shows how a mirage of romantic love morphs into exploitation. In a second, Tom’s seasoned assurance goes from sexy to cruel, as he orders Lea to take certain garments off in a motel room—no, the window isn’t to be blinded, do it now. Dack and her actors imbue every gesture in this sequence with a shuddery and intimate terror. This is the terror in which the universal anxiety of learning sex, and longing for it, is perverted into a foundation for enslavement. The moment when an erotic dream becomes a nightmare.
“Palm Trees and Power Lines” is now available to purchase on VOD.
